Emulex: Gen 5 FC Adapters and Converged Fabric Adapters …

Emulex Corporation announced three new products based on the its LightPulse Gen 5 FC (FC) technology, including the LPe16004 quad-port Gen 5 (16GFC) FC HBA, the LPe15004 quad-port low-profile Gen 5 (8GFC) HBA, and the LPe16202 dual-port converged fabric adapter (CFA).

         LPe16004

These adapters can be deployed as either host initiators or storage targets to deliver superior latency; maximized I/O performance and bandwidth; and reliability –  for enabling the power of virtualization, private cloud and emerging flash cache solutions in servers, arrays, and appliances.

"Our new quad-port Gen 5 FC HBA is the only HBA in the market that provides up to 2.4 million IO/s and four ports of full Gen 5 FC (16GFC) performance on a single HBA, driving mission critical virtualization, database, and storage target workloads. Our new quad-port low profile Gen 5 8GFC HBA uniquely delivers the PCIe 3.0 performance needed for virtualization and cloud workloads on mainstream 8GFC infrastructures, yet is compact enough for dense, 1U servers," said Shaun Walsh, SVP marketing and corporate development, Emulex. "In addition, our new dual-port CFA enables data centers, service providers, and specialized appliances to run FC one day and FCoE the next without disruption. This is critical in multi-tenant environments because it enables adapter standardization for data centers that run both FC and FCoE SANs simultaneously, which streamlines deployment, reduces cost and overhead inventory."

Gen 5 FC HBAs Accelerate
and Maximize Application Performance
The Gen 5 FC HBAs are for deployment with IO/s-hungry flash and cache workloads, enabling data centers to achieve performance and QoS across the network between their caching devices or flash-based arrays. They also enable increased VM ratios, mission-critical application virtualization, and support larger/faster database applications with the best IO/s and latency performance.

The two new adapters include:

• LPe16004 Gen 5 FC HBA: It is a quad-port Gen 5 FC HBA. It delivers performance with 2.4 million IO/s per HBA, up to 1.2 million IO/s on a single port, and more than twice the IO/s of other 16GFC HBAs, making it for environments that need to maximize FC connectivity, HA, and performance, including SSDs and new multi-core processor servers.
• LPe15004 Gen 5 FC HBA: The quad-port low-profile Gen 5 HBA is a fast 8GFC HBA, delivering up to 1.2 million IO/s on a single port, which is 6x more IO/s than competing 8GFC HBAs. In addition, the LPe15004 is a 8GFC HBA that supports PCIe 3.0 and T10 Protection Information with high-performance offload acceleration. With fast latency and better IO/s performance than other 8GFC HBAs, it is for the toughest virtualized, cloud and mission-critical workloads.

Flexible Converged Fabric Adapter
The LPe16202 dual-port Gen 5 FC CFA is capable of Gen 5 FC (16Gb/8Gb FC) or 10GbE FCoE personalities for virtualized data centers and private clouds, providing flexibility to run multiple protocols and speeds with a simple optics change. The ability to change fabric personalities is seamless via plug-and-play auto-detection of SFP+ optical transceivers without software configuration changes. Depending on which optical transceiver is installed, the CFA will intelligently know to run in FC or FCoE mode. In an Ethernet environment, the LPe16202 CFA provides Ethernet connectivity concurrently with FCoE and also supports direct attach copper (DAC) for 10GbE connectivity.

Benefits of Emulex CFA include:

• Design Flexibility and Simplicity: For OEMs, system integrators, and appliance vendors, it enables one adapter to be qualified, inventoried and configured at the time of shipment as either a Gen 5 FC HBA running at 8GFC or 16GFC, or 10GbE FCoE adapter based on the optics plugged into the adapter.
• Seamless Protocol Migration: For enterprise data centers and service providers using FC today, this new CFA makes it easy to migrate to FCoE without having to rip and replace adapters and drivers. Data centers running both FC and FCoE storage systems will benefit from standardizing on one adapter, simplifying their qualification process and streamlining spares inventory.

All Emulex HBAs and CFAs offer OneCore Storage Software Development Kit (SDK) support. It provides simplified driver support to accelerate the process of developing Gen 5 FC storage solutions to meet the  needs of the storage array and storage appliance markets that require enterprise, high bandwidth and low latency I/O connectivity. All Emulex HBAs and CFAs can also be controlled, configured, and managed from a single console using Emulex OneCommand Manager to enable enterprise scalability with time-saving features that provide more than twice the management functionality and take half the time to install and manage compared to other I/O solutions. OneCommand Manager plug-in for VMware vCenter Server allows users to manage hundreds of Emulex adapters natively from the vCenter Server console with the option of using a web-based client or desktop client.

"Modern data centers are more complex than ever, with mixed protocols, running thousands of VMs, and requiring the I/O throughput and performance to match the emerging flash caching, SSD and virtualized solutions entering the market," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "This new class of Gen 5 FC HBAs from Emulex provides the balanced IO/s and low latency that enables organizations to take full advantage of these high performance caching solutions."